OPINION — It’s the worst day of your life. You’ve been told that your unborn baby is dying inside of you and you are presented with two horrible options: medically induce labor to deliver her early or carry the dangerous pregnancy to term, when your baby will suffocate outside of your womb.

At that gruesome moment, your state representative, a 63-year-old part-time farmer, walks into the exam room and tells you what he thinks you should do. If you choose anything else, you and your doctor could both be prosecuted for murder.

OPINION — Let me tell you what is probably not going to make this column go viral: Me writing about infrastructure. But you know what I’m about to do? Write about infrastructure. That’s because, even though a journalist’s livelihood has come to depend on generating traffic, tweets and sticky, sharable content, somebody somewhere in America has got to do the boring stuff. Today I’m that person. Hopefully soon, Congress will join me in doing boring too.

Boring stuff, by definition, is so much a part of our everyday lives that nobody pays much attention to it. It’s turning on your water faucet and seeing clear water flow from the spigot. It’s going to the store for groceries and driving on a road that’s so smooth you never worry if you’ll complete the entire journey. It’s crossing a bridge and never thinking twice whether you’ll get to the other side, or plugging in your phone to charge it overnight and assuming you’ve got enough power for the job, because you want to have enough power for it.

On Sunday, longtime Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar died. For years, Lugar had been the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden was the top Democrat. Three weeks ago, Sen. Fritz Hollings, one of Biden’s best friends from his more than three decades in the chamber, also passed away. Last month, another longtime Indiana senator, Birch Bayh died.

OPINION — Meet “socialist,” the hardest-working word in politics in 2019. The single word has helped upstart Democrats attract young and social-curious potential voters, given the paddles of life to desperate-for-a-cause conservatives, and led President Donald Trump to an early and effective way to frame the re-election battle he wants to have with Democrats.

“Socialist” even made a usually ho-hum op-ed from a member of Congress, in this case Rep. Tom Emmer, one of Roll Call’s most read articles this week. “In their first 100 days, socialist Democrats have shown they are unable to lead.” You would read that, wouldn’t you?

OPINION — Jen Jordan went to the well of the Georgia Senate two weeks ago to tell Republican lawmakers that she wasn’t looking for a fight on abortion rights, but that she and other women in the state were willing to have it as the legislature prepared to pass one of the strictest abortion laws in the country. The “heartbeat bill,” which the governor is expected to sign, bans abortions after a doctor can detect a fetal heartbeat, typically around the sixth week of pregnancy.

In her dissent, the Democrat from Atlanta detailed for her fellow senators all kinds of impolite facts that most men in the chamber had probably never discussed publicly — a woman’s uterus, transvaginal ultrasounds, fertilized eggs, and why some women might not even know they are pregnant at six weeks, just one or two weeks past their menstrual period.

OPINION — If I had to guess, we’ve seen the last time Joe Biden smells a woman’s hair and plants a kiss on her head before a campaign event. Same goes for his somewhat notorious habit of close-talking the female relatives of new members of Congress as a way to put them at ease during the first-day-of-session photo shoots. (Maybe just a “You’ve got this, girl!” fist-bump next time, Mr. Vice President?)

I say this with absolute certainty because Joe Biden, unlike so many in Washington today, has shown an immense capacity to learn from his mistakes, if not avoid them altogether, over the course of his four-decade career in public service. It’s a quality Democrats should be celebrating, not punishing, as they look for a candidate who can both defeat President Donald Trump in 2020 and, not incidentally, run the country after that.

OPINION — There’s a slippery slope in Washington between oversight and overreach. It’s a path that’s been worn so smooth by politicians in D.C., you could practically pour water on it and charge admission for rides in the summer. Given a yellow light by voters in any given election to proceed cautiously, the winning party will almost always hit the gas to get where they want to go faster and farther than voters ever wanted to go in the first place.

As we learned in the 2018 midterms, voters want congressional oversight of the Trump White House. In fact, they demanded it. Nobody thinks a president should be allowed to run the government alone or without the other two branches of government checking his work.

OPINION — Working on Capitol Hill is the best of jobs and the worst of jobs, all rolled into one. The pay is low, the hours are long, and angry constituents aren’t wrong when they remind you that they pay your salary. But working on the Hill can also give staffers the chance, often at a young age, to build a résumé, make a positive difference in people’s lives, and literally change the world.

The intense experience can come and go in a flash, so I reached out to current and former Capitol Hill staffers to ask them what they’d tell their younger selves about the job that many remember as the hardest, most fun, and most rewarding of their professional lives.

OPINION — In the weeks leading up to the midterm elections, you could already see a tea party redux setting itself up for the Democrats in the same the way the original tea party movement had swept the Republicans into power in 2011.

There was the grassroots anger fueling the insurrection. The out-of-nowhere political superstars already gaining traction. And the out-of-power party establishment in Washington looking at the energy coming into their party as their ticket to rise to the majority. But once the tea partiers got to D.C., Republicans’ visions of power didn’t go as planned.

OPINION — On June 18, 1965, when copies of Roll Call sold for 10 cents apiece, the front page featured an item on the Congressional Secretaries Picnic, including a photo of a skeptical red-headed toddler eyeballing a nearby pal’s lunch plate.

That toddler was Jamie Dupree, the son of two Capitol Hill staffers, who grew up in the shadow of the Capitol, went to college in Florida, and just as quickly made his way back to D.C. and became Cox News Radio’s Washington correspondent.

OPINION — Only President Donald Trump could announce the parameters of his relationship with the newly Democratic House with a bite-sized limerick in his State of the Union address. “If there is going to be peace and legislation ... there cannot be war and investigation,” Trump said with a did-you-see-what-I-did-there smile on his face. “It just doesn’t work that way.”

Was it a threat? Was it a poem? Is there a war happening that we don’t know about? Whatever Trump meant with his rhyme, it illustrated the very real challenge Democrats have on their hands, with a fleet of committee chairmen eager to investigate the president, a progressive base hungry for results, and a president who has never played by (and has often broken) the rules in his personal life, in his business affairs, and as president — right down to that little ditty in the State of the Union.

OPINION — What are the chances that Republican lawmakers will work with Democrats to make changes to restrictive voting systems in the United States that have benefited Republicans in recent elections, either deliberately or accidentally?

That’s going to be the question going forward for the House Administration Elections Subcommittee, which is holding a series of field hearings around the country to examine the 2018 elections and the fundamental question of whether all U.S. citizens have equal and unfettered access to the right to vote, no matter their income or ethnicity.

OPINION — I love a tradition more than anybody, but the modern State of the Union address, which President Trump will deliver again Tuesday night, has descended into the most ridiculous annual hour and a half of nonsense that the country has to endure other than the Super Bowl. Can somebody please put America out of this misery?

The idea of an American president briefing Congress was originally such a practical necessity that it was codified in the Constitution. Without modern communications and with travel into and out of the capital difficult, the Founding Fathers correctly decided that the president should communicate regularly with the representatives of the states about the government they were all a part of.

OPINION — There was a time not long ago when women in politics were counseled never to speak about their children, if they were moms. A woman needed to seem strong enough for the job. Especially for the male consultants in the room, being a mom read “too soft,” maybe even too weak.

But among the other bragging rights that Speaker Nancy Pelosi can continue to collect after last week’s schooling of President Donald Trump in the government shutdown fight, Pelosi can claim this too: For the first time in American history, the most powerful person in the country is a woman. And not only did Pelosi not downplay her role as a mother and a grandmother in the process, she made it clear during the shutdown standoff against Trump that raising five children before her career in politics may actually have made her uniquely prepared for the job she holds and the president she’s dealing with.

OPINION — Are you sick of all the fighting in Washington? Are you sure? Because for the last 20 years, with a few hopeful exceptions, Americans have voted for exactly this — fighting, intransigence, and leaders who have made a habit of specifically promising to fight and not back down.

Fighting in American politics is nothing new, of course, especially in a country founded by revolutionaries. But at some point, American leaders went from promising to fight the country’s enemies to believing we are each other’s enemies. The story of that evolution, at least in the last several years, comes down to a single word — “fight.”

OPINION — It’s Day 25 of the longest government shutdown in American history and there’s only one end in sight.

It’s not a compromise between Democrats and President Donald Trump. White House aides say the president is “dug in” on his demand for $5.7 billion for a border wall. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called the wall “immoral.” There is very little hope for a breakthrough between “dug in” and “immoral,” especially between two sides that both think they’ve got the moral high ground — and voters — on their side.

OPINION — The knives are out for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman phenom who unseated Rep. Joe Crowley in the summer primary and went on to make history as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.

Why did I even mention that part? We all know who the congresswoman is, and that is both her biggest asset and her greatest danger as she begins what could be a lifelong career of impact or a two-year experiment in modern, celebrity legislating.

OPINION — 2018 will go in the books as a bad one for most Republicans. They picked up two seats in the Senate, but lost 40 in the House. Their numbers among women in the House shrank from 23 to 13, and President Donald Trump can’t give away his chief of staff job.

Ask anyone who’s been there: The only thing worse than losing the majority in Congress is every day after that, when chairing committees and holding press conferences is replaced by packing boxes and saying goodbye to staff.